August: Osage County – 8

If Nebraska was bleak, the Oklahoma of Osage County was bleaker, and hotter and the family more dysfunctional and meaner, in a deep, searing way. The film read as a play transported to the screen, not least because of the haunting echoes of the great American playwrights – O’Neill, Williams, Albee. Every line and every look had meaning, and when it came to looks Meryl Streep gave a lot of them. The pleasant surprise was that Julia Roberts stood up to Streep’s performance, with her own inherited dominating mean streak leaving her, in the end, just as alone. The rare accomplishment of Tracy Lett’s screenplay is that it not only introduced you to fully formed characters, but at movie’s end you were left to ponder, what would happen to each of them. [Smoking – 3]

Gloria – 5

1:45 was a long time to wait for Umberto Tozzi’s rendition of our favorite dance song. It was a thrilling moment to see Gloria shed her glasses and let loose to her eponymous tune, but there wasn’t much of interest that came before. She had a very pleasant smile and was good company and her character was well drawn: a bit needy, not quite able to protect herself from life’s disappointments. It’s just that her life, and the people around her, weren’t that interesting. Enough Said comes to mind as a comparison, but no one here was James Gandolfini. [Smoking – 3]

Broken Circle Breakdown – 5

Expecting an Oscar-worthy, country-music-tinged dose of European realism, I found myself watching a 7-year-old girl die of cancer, her father lose his mind and her mother commit suicide. Where was the redeeming art? Despite their longing looks, there was a strange lack of chemistry between the lovers, and the director constantly bounced back-and-forth between the past and present to artificially manufacture some depth that wasn’t there. By movie’s end, instead of the story’s coming together, it had shot off in three or four different directions and thudded off the rails. [Smoking – 2]

Top Ten – 2013

At one point, I thought I would use this year’s list to highlight the unconventional approaches to moviemaking that gave me so much enjoyment. The Great Beauty and Blue Is the Warmest Color both benefited from my seeing them while I was rereading Proust. Neither had a traditional story arc; one was a portrait of a love affair, the other an essay on art and memory – both Proustian subjects, neither for someone in a hurry. Post Tenebras Lux was the most innovative of all, a movie version of the magic realism we’ve seen in Latin American writing by Garcia Marquez and others. It was shown, fittingly, at the Walker Art Center and left behind a trail of stunning images. Caesar Must Die transported Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to an Italian prison, bringing to new life a centuries-old play, much like Ralph Fiennes’ Coriolanus did last year.The Place Beyond the Pines jerked me to attention when one movie seemed to end and another began; instead of seamlessly blending together, the two halves left the viewer to make the connections. Of course, for sheer bravura filmmaking, there was Gravity, but its refusal to care much about a plot and its absurd ending left it off my list.

But that plan for a top ten innovative films didn’t count on Captain Phillips, featuring the most traditional of movie stars, Tom Hanks. It wasn’t Hanks, though, that got me – quite the contrary. It was the movie’s daring presentation of Somali pirates as sympathetic characters and the U.S. as bullies who don’t keep their word. The movie was constantly thought-provoking and beautifully filmed. Enough Said and Mud were two more traditional American films, one a romantic comedy, the other a dramatic adventure. Both had some of my favorite acting of the year: James Gandolfini, ably abetted by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, was the most real lover, with the most real heartbreak, I saw this year; while the kid in Mud, abetted by his sidekick, was my favorite character for all of 2013. 12 Years A Slave stands as a cinematic landmark: it was hard watching, but it will define slavery for everyone who saw it. It illuminated history, unlike Lee Daniels’ The Butler, which shamelessly exploited it.

That only leaves Barbara, to which I have somewhat tentatively assigned the top spot on my list. It is not powerful, or surprising or innovative. But when I left the theater I felt I had seen an almost perfect movie. The bleak East German setting brought us face-to-face with the everyday moral decisions faced by real people, reminiscent of the similarly located The Lives of Others (2009). It was as thought-provoking as Captain Phillips, as historically acute as 12 Years A Slave, as personally emotional as Enough Said, and, finally, as dramatic as Mud or The Place Beyond the Pines. It was just a fine movie.
There were other fine movies in 2013, and the following make up my roster of Honorable Mention: Nebraska, Out of the Furnace, Don Jon, A Touch of Sin, World War Z, Fruitvale Station, and maybe American Hustle.

Making my selection of a top ten easier is the decision to have a separate category for Documentaries. Here there was a tie between The Gatekeepers, a politically amazing series of interviews of Shin Bet leaders, interspersed with archival footage; and Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present, a remarkable translation of an artist’s work to the screen.

And finally, I acknowledge The Impossible, the story of the Thailand tsunami with Naomi Watts that I didn’t see in time to include on my 2012 Top Ten, where it surely belongs.

Nebraska – 8

Bruce Dern plays a Midwestern Lear in the role of a lifetime (I know, because I saw his other career highlights in a Film Festival tribute the next day) and June Squibb is an Oscar-worthy match for Jennifer Lawrence in an uncannily similar role; but what most intrigued me was the son, played uncomfortably by Will Forte. He let life push him around – is this why he sympathized with his father? – and in almost every scene I wondered, why is he doing this. At the end, he becomes uber-decisive, and the only thing I wondered about more than why this change was where did he get the money? This was a writer’s movie – one comedy sketch after another – painted on an empty black-and-white canvas, with the Nebraska sky providing most of the empty. The best thing was the depiction of how people, especially family, reacted to Woody’s sudden wealth. That nothing else made much sense was a minor drawback.

Big Bad Wolves – 8.5

This had everything Quentin Tarantino could want in a movie – suspense, outrageous gore, great characters and humor everywhere – which is presumably why he calls it the best movie of the year. The plot contains just enough ambiguity to keep you guessing, and the shocker of an ending either explains it all or leaves you wanting to ask someone, what just happened? The humorous bits – the villain’s mother calls on his cell phone just as he is about to pull off his victim’s toenails – balance the tension but don’t relieve it. We are told very little about the characters, but we quickly recognize their distinct personalities. And best of all, said the man next to me in the men’s room, the bad guy looked just like Dick Cheney. (How much are foreign films – this one is Israeli – helped by having actors we’ve never seen before, in other roles?)

Her – 6

Frankly, I got a little tired of full-screen shots of Joaquin Phoenix’s face. They admirably conveyed his every thought and feeling, but his thoughts and feelings weren’t particularly interesting. What interest there was lay in Scarlett Johansson’s disembodied voice, a personal OS that provided Theodore’s love interest. Hearing Her develop a personality that reflected His input was fun to consider for awhile, but once she lit out on her own – a la 2001’s Hal – the concept lost credibility, and it lost me completely when She announced that she was in 643 other relationships simultaneously. In the end, I took away nothing.

A Touch of Sin – 7.5

A searing portrait of contemporary Chinese society, not always comprehensible to a Westerner, although violence is a fairly universal language. The separate stories are marginally related, enough that you feel it is one society you are seeing; and the protagonists are similarly social misfits or outcasts, who all, in different ways, want a better life for themselves. You can calibrate the degree of justification behind the murders or suicide they commit, but more interesting, in a way, is the wall of mass conformity they each stand out from. Whether intentional or not, the indictment of China as a harsh and soulless place, not to mention corrupt and immoral, is devastating.

Philomena – 5

Dull. A tear-jerker that failed to jerk any tears. Why was this movie of an Irish mother’s search for her lost son in America so unaffecting? Maybe because there was so little drama: finding the son turned out to be easy; so the search became a search for details about his life, which wasn’t very exciting. The potentially explosive story of the convent’s selling off babies to America then covering up the past was botched: other than one benighted sister, we couldn’t tell who was responsible or if anyone was really bad. Maybe it was the lack of chemistry between the two principals: Steve Coogan seemed a detached commentator, not a credible journalist; and while Judi Dench is a remarkable actress, it’s hard for someone so smart to play dumb convincingly without just coming across as cute. This was another example of a movie “based on true events” being less interesting than a story someone devised for the sake of entertainment.

The Great Beauty (La Grande Bellezza) – 8.3

I could be wrong, but I found this Proustian: a famous writer who never produces a second book until, at last, he sees his aimless life as the subject. His madeleine? the naked breasts he is shown by a great beauty when he is 18. Maybe this is a stretch, but it fits the course of the movie, as Jep Gambardella goes from celebration to interview to private party to strip club to dinner to another party to an affair to a funeral to dinner party and on and on. The plot, certainly, is Proustian: there is no story arc, we just see a life in progress; characters come and go, while the narrator holds up his world for close inspection and general, if gentle, mockery. This is Italy, after all, and most particularly Rome. The Catholic church, modern art, the literary elite, sex, death, dining, tourism – all are viewed with a jaundiced eye. “My parties have the best ‘trains’ – they go nowhere.” The clothes are beautiful, the views of Rome are beautiful, the music is beautiful, the women are beautiful. We don’t have to decide if that is enough; we can just enjoy the view.